Canadian Mikhaila Peterson is the poster girl for low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) living. Actually, not just LCHF – she’s the global poster girl for a carnivorous, ketogenic lifestyle.

Following in her ketogenic footsteps is her famous father, Dr Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist and University of Toronto psychology professor. His diet is not as restrictive as his daughter’s. He eats meat and greens only – and olive oil. Mikhaila eats meat and salt only and drinks lots of sparkling water. (Editor’s note: Jordan recently ditched the greens to follow his daughter on the meat-only path.)

Both father and daughter have reversed all symptoms of serious auto-immune illness that plagued them for decades in body and mind. And Jordan no longer has digestive issues, minor psoriasis, mouth ulcers, fatigue or any difficulty maintaining a healthy weight.

Comparisons are odious but he freely admits that his daughter has had a much rougher ride. That’s putting it mildly because the ride reads like a medical horror story. Mikhaila (26) tells her story with insight and intelligence, peppered with detached wit and humorous acceptance.

It’s a redemptive tale of beating the odds and fighting back from the living hell of life-threatening illness and pain. Ultimately, Mikhaila rescued herself by ignoring conventional medical and dietary “wisdom”.

By the time she was 17, Mikhaila had 38 affected joints and multiple joint replacements. At one stage, she was walking around on two broken legs for a year. She also suffered eczema, rashes over her entire body, never-ending itchiness, severe acne on her face, cystic acne on her buttocks, vaginal area, and armpits.

Dr Jordan Peterson

That’s all gone and both father and daughter have also overcome debilitating depression.

Through ketogenic (very-low-carb, high-fat) living, both are off all drugs that doctors prescribed. They’ve never felt better in body and mind and say they won’t revert to their former eating habits.

Mikhaila says she was “a really sick person” from toddlerhood. She has documented her journey back to health on her Don’t Eat That blog. It’s a fascinating read.

Her father tells his story on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. (It’s long and he only comes in at the end of the first six minutes.) Jordan is also author of the best-selling 12 Rules For Life, An Antidote to Chaos.

Mikhaila’s story is a powerful antidote to the chaos of scare tactics, myths and misinformation she faced on diet and nutrition.

As a child, Mikhaila dreamed of becoming a surgeon. That dream dissipated once she realised it wasn’t a good choice for someone with arthritic hands. But the medical profession’s loss became nutrition science’s gain.

Arthritis is just one of the many serious ailments that showed up in Mikhaila’s early childhood. She has a genetic predisposition on the maternal side. Her mother, Tammy, also reversed her own arthritis symptoms after changing to an LCHF diet.

From the age of two, Mikhaila was prone to bacterial infections – strep throat, colds, flu, respiratory problem, yeast infections. You name it, she suffered from it.

Dr Jordan Peterson and Mikhaila as a young child

When she was seven, doctors diagnosed severe rheumatoid arthritis. That diagnosis was almost a relief. Her parents initially dismissed her moans and groans as symptoms of a spirited, high-maintenance, attention-seeking child.

As her illnesses progressed, the symptoms quickly dispelled that notion. And over the years, her moods began to swing.

In Grade 5, doctors diagnosed severe depression, anxiety and occasional hypomania. The latter is a mild form of mania, marked by elation and hyperactivity). They prescribed drugs.

“Antidepressants were honestly a godsend,” Mikhaila says.

Doctors also diagnosed “idiopathic hypersomnia”, a condition not too distinct from narcolepsy. In other words, Mikhaila battled to stay awake. She spent around 17 hours a day sleeping. The rest of the time she existed in a “half daze”.

Along with the extensive joint replacement surgery and chronic pain, that affected her academic performance. Mikhaila had to take a fifth year of high school. Aged 19, she went to university to study psychology but that “didn’t work”.

“My grades were good but I couldn’t stay awake.”

As her mental health issues worsened, she had to drop out. Mikhaila made a brief foray into makeup school but dropped out there too.

“Who was I kidding?” she asks rhetorically. And anyway, her wrists bothered her. Another bad career move for someone with arthritis as well as a host of other health problems.

She took high-school maths and sciences that she had missed. Her aim? “I wanted to study medical science at university. I wanted to figure out what the hell was wrong with me.”

She was living a real, live hell.

Mikhaila was on a cocktail of powerful drugs daily: antidepressants, immune suppressants, opioid-derived painkillers and, amphetamines. She took high doses of the stimulant drug, Ritalin, to get her out of bed and stay there, at least for some hours of the day. The drugs weren’t helping much.

Her skin started to itch. With all the other health challenges, she ignored that one. But the skin problems grew worse. And at age 19 she began to have cystic acnes – blistering and painful bumps.

Vanity was the first key that drove her to start experimenting with diet. “The sight of sores on my face that would not heal scared me.”

All in their heads?

In December 2014, she consulted doctors. They either had no idea what was happened or said that her high levels of anxiety were the cause. In other words, that her problems were psychosomatic, all in her head.

“Blame the patient, thanks,” Mikhaila says ruefully.

Doctors tend to resort to labels when they don’t know the real cause of a patient’s problem. Thus began her chronic scepticism of the medical profession.

It motivated her to investigate food as medicine. One target became clear: gluten. Mikhaila cut out gluten from her diet in May 2015.

It helped a little but not much. She made herself a “treat”: gluten-free, sugar-free almond flour banana muffins. They were delicious and she wolfed them down. The next morning her hands hurt.

She had a couple more muffins “because they were so tasty”. Two days later, she couldn’t walk.

Mikhaila spent much of that year learning. And most of the time she felt miserable about her increasingly severe food intolerances.

But there was another driver, an even more defining moment than simple vanity. In the summer of 2015, a distant cousin on her father’s side died suddenly aged just 30. That cousin also had skin problems that wouldn’t heal – an autoimmune disorder. Doctors had no idea what caused her death.

That terrified Mikhaila, coming so soon after her own skin sores that would not heal.

She recalls thinking: “Holy shit. I’m dying. I’m on 15 medications so I can wake up in the morning. And if I don’t figure out what the hell is wrong with me I’m going to die.”

In September 2015, she began an elimination LCHF diet “completely randomly”. She was still sceptical about the role of diet in illness.

Mikhaila cut her diet down to chicken, beef, fish, rice, sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach and salad greens. She used coconut, olive oil and apple cider vinegar and most spices. Some of those foods still irritated her but she had removed most of the worst offenders.

Within a month, her health had improved. Her skin healed and arthritis vanished. The fatigue and depression, however, stuck around for a bit longer.

Mikhaila tried to reintroduce cheese – she was always a huge cheese fan. That precipitated a lactose intolerance response that nearly required another hospital stint. She tried reintroducing almond butter but her skin broke out again. The itch and arthritis returned.

Mikhaila even tried reintroducing Sour Patch Kids. The company that makes the candy calls it a ” fun, soft, and chewy candy for children and adults”. As it contains no soy, dairy or gluten, Mikhaila thought it was unlikely to do any harm. Her skin told “a different story”.

One problem was that experts had based everything she had read until then on the premise that it doesn’t matter what you eat as long as you exercise.

“That is a HUGE and dangerous lie,” Mikhaila says. “What you put into your body is as important as what medications you’re taking. Changing the way you eat can change your life.”

Consequently, she embarked on the path to prove that life change. And when she became pregnant with her daughter, Elizabeth Scarlett, Mikhaila found it easy to resist conventional dietary advice.

She ate LCHF throughout her pregnancy. “No cheating, ever.”

After Scarlett’s birth in August 2017, Mikhaila began researching the benefits of very LCHF, ketogenic diets. She decided to try a “zero-carb”, all-meat diet. It’s the one she follows to this day. She eats mostly ribeye steak, 2-3 pounds of meat a day. She drinks lots of water, sparkling whenever possible.

Results, she says, have been nothing short of “amazing”.

The carnivorous diet also helped her lose pregnancy weight in an enviably short time. Mikhaila posted a selfie on Instagram, showing her streamlined form eight months after giving birth.

She was in her underwear, no different, really, from wearing a bikini. Not surprisingly, that brought out the trolls, mostly males.

The sexism is breathtaking. After all, Mikhaila wasn’t naked. And medical doctors who also eat a high-meat diet, beefcake US physicians Ted Naiman and Shawn Baker among them, show even more flesh.

Naiman’s diet is 70% meat and Baker is carnivorous. Both often post pictures of themselves online.

They are naked from the waist up, showing six packs and arm muscles on a high-meat diet. No one breathes a word of criticism and rightly so.

US carnivorous physician Dr Shawn Baker

Mikhaila describes the effects of diet on her wellbeing as like waking up. But it was also terrifying.

“The fact that I could have prevented all my horrible diseases with diet, and I could have avoided hip and ankle replacements scarred me. I’m still not over it.”

She couldn’t even go into hospitals for a while because the idea of a doctor enraged her. “I’m a bit better now but I still don’t have a good relationship with the medical community.”

She no longer takes vitamin and mineral supplementation. “I had my mineral and vitamin levels tested. And I experimented with vitamins and minerals a lot,” she says. ” I hoped they would minimize the food reactions and arthritic symptoms. They did nothing.”

She receives emailed suggestions daily from people. “Honestly, I’ve tried everything. What works best for me is a carnivorous diet.”

Mikhaila isn’t suggesting that a carnivorous diet will work for everyone. Far from it. But for anyone with serious health problems, she says that it makes sense to try radical dietary change before heavy drugs.

So, is Mikhaila really a paragon of meat-eating virtue? Does she ever resort to the odd “cheat” day? And what’s the most unhealthy thing she does – if anything?

US physician Dr Ted Naiman’s before and after eating 70% meat-only diet.

Mikhaila enjoys alcohol. However, once she changed to an LCHF diet, she realised that alcohol affected her mood.

“I seem to tolerate (alcohol) much better on the zero-carb diet,” she says. “So I will drink bourbon or vodka but rarely.”

Mikhaila intends to breastfeed Scarlett for at least 12 months. “And then whenever she naturally wants to stop, we’ll stop. We’ll just play it by ear,” she says.

Will she raise Scarlett LCHF? Not zero-carb or meat-only but Mikhaila says Scarlett is “already a fan of steak”. She won’t feed her daughter dairy, gluten, or sugar. And she’ll keep fruits “for treats”.

Mikhaila makes light of the hard journey she has travelled in body and mind. On the question of where her remarkable resilience comes from, she is offhand.

“What are the options? When life throws you curveballs you can give up and die or deal with it.

“I didn’t want to give up and die.”

She recalls the moment a doctor told her at age 14 that she had not outgrown arthritis – and likely never would. She lay bed thinking: “Fuck you, world! I am not letting this get to me.”

She credits her parents with that resilience. Her father always told her to never use illness as an excuse. “He helped me with that. It’s a very important lesson.”

Her mother looked into diet before it became the trendy thing to do. When Mikhaila was in Grade 2, her mother told doctors that oranges caused her daughter’s arthritis flare-up.

“They laughed at her,” Mikhaila says.

“I can’t imagine having a sick child. I get tearful just thinking about it. My mother is strong and pushed us to look at diet.

“She’s always ahead of the curve. She bought an infrared sauna before that was a health fad. My mother started low level-lasering before that was a thing. She’s really cool.”

Among Mikhaila’s strengths is a forward-looking disposition. But if she could edit her life, there is one thing she would change.She would have started an all-meat diet from day one. Or at least she would have figured it out before she needed surgery.

She has few pet peeves. One is people telling her that the gluten-free trend is for “stupid California girls”. Another is people ” who speak as if they know what they’re talking about when they don’t. Therefore, they spread misinformation.

And her biggest fear is that she’ll do “something wrong” with Scarlett.

“Parents can’t be perfect but what I went through was horrific. I don’t want anyone to experience that if I can help it. And I’m worried about Scarlett and her reactions to food.

As for her hopes and dreams, Mikhaila hopes that her extended family will figure their diets out. And that doctors will use diet as first-line treatment for chronic disease.

“I hope all the unhappy, overweight, sick people find out that it’s food causing their problems. And that it’s not their fault and they can get better.

“I just want this information to spread.”

That leads to her idea of paradise. “A place where gluten is illegal, misinformation about diet doesn’t exist and people don’t think vegetarianism is the healthiest diet,” she says.

I have one question though. Posted in comments on FB articles before. Maybe i missed it in the article though, since i got no answers to this day.
What about the Vitamin C. To my knowledge, is not present in animal foods. Just in..vegetable sources (it makes me sick just pronouncing due to my hate for vegetable food). Doesn’t the body need this vitamin C? Preventing scurvy being the main reason?
I ask, due to my hate for greenish stuff. at the moment i still bother with peppers as i tolerate them, but heck…

There is actually Vitamin C in meat although not a lot but it is there. I believe Amber O’Hearn has written and spoken about this. Also, the body’s version of sugar and Vitamin C apparently compete for access to cells, so reducing sugar metabolism actually increases Vitamin C sensitivity, so a LCHF person or carnivore can get by on much less vitamin C because more of what they do get is making it into the cells.

From Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, on p. 456 he reminds reader of pp. 320-26 where it is discussed that animal products contain all the amino acids, minerals, and vitamins essential for health. Issue of needing exogenous Vit C? Seems to only be a problem in presence of high carb.

Loved the article, but I admit I was looking for what she eats in a day; a week…Does she intermittant fast at all? 3 meals a day? What’s a breakfast look like; lunch? Dinner?
Inquiring minds want to know!

I can only assume the trolls who didn’t like the picture were the usual fantatics who bring discredit on vegetarians and vegans. Human health isn’t very important to them. After all the trouble she’s had, Mikhaila’s entitled to be proud of looking and feeling so good. If beach photographs are ok, why isn’t this one? If she’s been fat and ugly, no doubt that would have been ’empowering’.

Mikhaila’s experience with doctors is sadly all too common, but, as we all know, most of them know little or nothing about food. Unless I have symptoms that concern me, I stay well away from doctors and the drugs they almost inevitably prescribe.

It may be true that one feels good eating a bad diet – for a while – but dead animals, when chewed and swallowed by humans, speed up the ageing process. Maybe you feel better for a while, like a car fitted with a turbocharger, but in the same way, the wear and tear is speeded up.

Before you post, can you not at least scan over the article? She’s been through hell on plants, and has found relief and salvation through meat. And you want to put her back through hell again because of some ignorant, misguided belief system. Over the next couple of decades plant-based will be dropped into the dustbin of history – and future generations will laugh at the stupidity of it!

One can grow all the food a vegan person need, on 2 square meters in ideal conditions. To grow all the animals to feed one person, you need between 9 and 16 Hectares.. and a hectare, for those who knows not, is about 10 000 square meters. Thus there will be intense famine soon if all wish to chew dead animals. Plus, of course the animals ingested all the toxins that was radiated upon and precipitated on around 50 000 times more surface than a vegan. I’m not a vegan but a VERY, exceptionally healthy vegetarian and, remembering my chronic ill health as an animal eater, plan to remain one.

If the land surrounding our villages, towns and cities were left to grow wild and we simply managed what was available to eat, would it be sustainable? I wonder what truth there is in this lack of sustainability when meat is concerned. Farming in the UK covers great swaiths of land, mostly for agriculture it seems, with a big rise in crops of oil seed rape and the like. I find it difficult to comprehend that much of what is raised in agriculture may even be necessary…. Adding to the equation some more is the amount of waste and associated processing requirements that needs to occur. It would be great to see how “sustainable” eating plants really is, after all 2500 kcal is a lot of dandelions….

From an individual perspective yes but… There are many reasons people will give for becoming vegetarian or vegan, that is personal choice however there is little personal choice in nature and as such if the area’s surrounding our villages, towns and cities were left to grow wild sustainability would become nature’s choice. With that we would all be forced to adhere to our species type eating habits. Human beings are omnivorous not vegetarian. The closer we adhere to our natural eating habits the healthier we will be. As such a diet rich in animals of all shapes and sizes would be consumed. As humans we have only short large intestines, the area that is used for the digestion of plant matter, compared with herbivorous animals like our closely related cousins gorillas, which have a long large intestine. Time will surely tell as to how well vegetarians thrive. I have yet to see families of vegetarians with generations that have followed a herbivorous lifestyle. We are just seeing what is happening to the recent generations that have adopted the low fat high carb approach and it’s far from pretty. To closely resemble our natural eating habits is the key to all of the sustainability issues. With little processing, little waste, less energy consumed. Let’s get the open fields back to forests, the yet more open fields back to open plains. Idealistic I know but…there are far more species of animal that can sustain and invigour life that nature has already provided. Far more than the plants than man has invented…

The vegetarian argument always avoids the the subject of the harm done by crop growing and the fact that meat production turns grass into protein.

The fields around me are feeding sheep and cows grazing freely in the fields. That sort of meat production is far more sustainable than mono-culture crops grown with pesticides and scarce water.

The most commonly reported change by people who change to a low carb way of eating is an increase in the amount of vegetables eaten. But dispensing with the fear of natural fat offends the plant-based ideology.

No an animal cannot “turn grass into protein”.. ALL proteins are produced in plants. Animals just re-arrange the sequence of amino acids they get from plants. And this re-arranged sequence closely resembles our own.. which means we have to make enzymes to dis-assemble proteins (digest them) and antibodies that attach to them… both these can easily turn on our own. This is the basis of degenerative and auto-immune diseases.

Yes I have just been walking over the local farmland these last few sunny days. The year the majority of it seems to be rape, but wheat is not far behind. Most of the other crops are carbs too. The Big Arable guys I know do their best for the wildlife and grow pheasants and partridges around the field margins which are left to, or sown with, wildfowers for winter seed.

Nevertheless they use huge quantities of diesel and chemicals. Beef and lamb comes from smaller farms with much lower inputs mainly on land which cannot be cropped. Grass is human-indigestible until turned into meat. Free range pork is somewhere in between – as non-ruminants they are largely fed grains and soy and other stuff, but their dung and rooting rejuvenates the land for future crops.

I find the carnivores very interesting but personally I like to have some vegetables with my meat, poultry, game and fish. Just not the Holy Health Grains, sugar or manufactured foodlike substances. Sorry dieticians but I have not yet expired without them.

I’m not sure what side of the argument this falls on, but it is Allan Savory on desertification – He dispels many myths – ONE was that only dry lands get desertified (turned into deserts). The other myth was that grazing led to desertification. After having 40K elephants shot early in his career (a mistake he says he’ll bring with him to his grave), it made things WORSE. He felt so guilty he devoted his life to finding out HOW THIS WORKS. Also addresses climate change and how it can be vastly ameliorated.

Go away and educate yourself on the C02 release ploughing up land for plants, and carbon sequestration properties of properly husbanded animals. Then find yourself a picture of the acres of greenhouse covering large parts of Spain to feed UK vegans. You say you are not vegan, but the way you talk of eating animals speaks volumes. Proper animal husbandry, combined with non destructive arable farming and crop rotation, taking care of our animals, soils and water supplies. Fix the world by eating less but better quality!

My family practices regenerative farming, as my parents and grandparents did. Separating the animals from the plants only damages the land. You really need both to balance your soil. The way most modern farming is done IS destructive to the soil, and our planet as a whole. You’re not doing better if you exclude one or the other from the farm. There seems to be this myth that removing the animals from the landscape is better for our environment and food system when it is most certainly not. Did you want nutrients in your food? Then you want animals to balance the cycle of life. Famine comes in many forms – not just in the quantity of food we consume. The nutritional quality of our food is important, and yet we keep a system in place that is destroying the quality of our soil and robbing us of quality food.

This is so wrong on many levels. Your body needs vitamins and minerals from all kinds of foods. I have been living an LCHF diet for the last six months and my body has responded positively. I no longer have metabolic syndrome and I have lost all of my visceral fat and I feel great. So does my husband who has now lost 56 lbs in weight. But I have always given us a moderate-carb diet and not a low-carb diet. Because I absolutely believe that high carbs are bad for you…but that you need the vitamins and minerals from great low carb vegetables that are out there. As well as vegetables, cheeses, yoghurts, small amount of fruit, nuts etc. I absolutely do not agree that cutting all food groups out other than meat is good for any person at all.

None of the great doctors and professors on the DietDoctor site advocate a meat-only way of life

Hi Maggie, nowhere does Mikhaila say that a meat-only diet is for everyone. The point of her story is that it works for her after excluding all other foods. Of course, it’s extreme to anyone with a western dietary mindset. However, there are traditional societies, including the Inuit in Canada, who have eaten high-meat, high-fat diets because that’s all the food to which they have access most of the year. And they have survived and thrived. They only started experiencing diseases that plague the West – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc, once they changed to a higher-carb, and refiend and processed carb diet. I also know many doctors across the globe, including the two US physicians mentioned in that article, Dr Shawn Baker who eats meat only and Dr Ted Naiman, whose diet is around 70% meat and they are doing just fine. In my opinion, and I am not expert but I have done years of investigation and reading on the matter, the gut microbiome is the deciding factor. And everyone’s microbiome is different. Some people can likely not handle a meat-only diet well. Others, Mikhaila among them, are clearly thriving on it. There is no one-size-fits-all but her story and others show that there is no need to fear a meat-only diet. Animal foods just happen to be the most nutrient-dense on the planet. With the best will in the world, plant foods just can’t compete.

Even if their life expectancy is not good, it doesn’t automatically follow that their diet is what is reducing their life expectancy. In the case of the Inuit, for example, I have previously encountered the argument that their current relatively low life expectancy is the direct result of thier traditional high fat diet. What is ignored in this assertion is that with a multitude of confounding factors, it is fallacious to cherry pick two of them and then assume that there must be a causal relation between them. The Inuit have one of the highest smoking rates in North America, which seems a much more likely causal factor than fat, considering they lived for centuries on their traditional diet before being introduced to tobacco and the other industrial society products Marika describes above. As for being physically active, perhaps so, but it’s not as if more or less physical activity will alter the fundamental way substances are processed by the body; this is underscored by the fact that exercise has been shown to only marginally effective in mitigating obesity and its associated health issues, leading to the aphorism that “You can’t outrun a bad diet.” Indeed, it is because peoples such as the Inuit have needed to be as physically active as they have that if thier traditional diets were truly and fundamentally unhealthy they would certainly have all died out long ago. (As for less “intellectual activity,” my impression is that much of a traditional society’s mental resources are focused upon surviving and thriving in an environment that might well kill someone born and raised in the industrial world, not just due a modern person’s lack of physical fitness but of requisite knowledge to survive, so it strikes me as an apples and oranges comparison.)

All of us who have lived over the past 50 years have been subjected to the brainwashing and dogma of the dieticians and ‘nutritionists’ ‘more fibre is better’ and ‘eat your 64 a day’ brigade. I recall in my twenties doing the F-Plan diet. How rich Audrey Eyton got with that one! I’m glad that Mikhaila has found her own way through her (many) troubles, but I feel for her parents having had to live through that and feeling so helpless, and then afterwards knowing that the cure was available to them had they only known. But the dogma and the trust in doctors was so ingrained in us you wouldn’t imagine that rather than helping your child they were killing her!

Fortunately they are a resilient family, and I’m sure they look more to the future than regret the past. I wish them well…

Bravo to Michaela…you and your folks are awesome and very forward thinking and moving the food-illness conversation forward and upward!

For people with histamine issues, which can pose a problem with meats that are typically aged to some degree, we found that soaking beef, chicken, pork and even fish in slightly warmed and salted water for 15 minutes then thoroughly rinsing under running water eliminates a great deal of the histamine raising bacteria on the meats’ and skins’ surfaces. This really does work very well. My wife’s histamine reactions to eating grass-fed beef are now completely gone with this method. Give it a try and see for yourself. One caveat, this does not work for grass-fed ground beef. Grass-fed animals are lower in fat than grain-fed/finished and are therefore a bit less tender in general. Typically, the meats are hung and aged for a period of days and even up to several weeks in order to allow beneficial bacteria to proliferate from the outside-in on the meat’s surface which helps in the breaking down of somewhat tougher tissue. The longer the meat is aged the more tender and flavorful. The soaking and rinsing works well on the unground beef pieces but once ground the bacteria are then mixed into the meat and there’s no real way to effectively get rid of it. We’ve tried and have not really had success doing this. By the way, this also works really well with organ meats. We now enjoy liver with no headaches or anxiety/depression reactions.

I have nothing but praise for Mikhaila. From a sickly child to a healthy, beautiful young lady. All this from dietary change and nothing else with no help from the medical profession! Having positive parents as a role models would have helped her go through her tough times, no doubt

I did an elimination diet for a couple weeks, eating beef, chicken, lots of greens and broccoli, olive & coconut oil and sweet potatoes. Constipated after about three days. I barely “went” even with lots of fiber and fat. ‘Twas disconcerting. Do one’s bowels ever move on so much meat?

Jennifer, try to add bone broth to your diet and good magnesium, like citrate. Drink enough of water. Also, you may want to have larger doses of pure ascorbic acid, for example one big teaspoon dissolved in 200ml of water and drink slowly. That should help. Cheers!

Jennifer – You will likely go to the bathroom easier is you eliminate all plant foods. That been the almost universal experience of people in my Facebook group Principia Carnivora. It tajes the body a few weeks to adapt to all-meat. Eating more fat can help keep things moving better, especially in the beginning. Most people do not have a bowel movement every day on an all-meat diet. Some only go once a week. As long as you are not in pain or discomfort, you are not constipated.

It may be too much fiber in your diet or maybe your body is different and you are able to eat other things? You’ve really just got to listen to your body and it will tell you if something disagrees with you

Having followed a LCHF/carnivorous diet for around a decade, I’ve found that there’s a period of adaptation that varies from person to person. I would say that this fundamentally is due to how insulin resistant/sensitive that person is. Sticking with things, you’ll find that once your sensitivity has become normal other changes occur. Protein sensitivity increases, vitamin C sensitivity plus many other changes. All of which come together over a period of time that will be individual to you. Possibly weeks but more than likely months, even years. Keep the chicken consumption low, as they are very low in fat. I have seen symptoms of hypoglycemia in people that “forget” that it’s high-fat not modern low-fat that we are trying to achieve, ending up with a very high-protein diet…. Like Jimmy Moore experienced in his experiments recently. As for constipation, well I was a twice a day man on a modern diet, having adapted to my current eating habits I would say that any more than 2 – 3 times a week and I’d be wondering if I’d had my food spiked!

Actually, the recent research shows that fiber is unnecessary and actually blocks people up, the opposite of what we have been told. On a carnivore diet, you will likely go much less frequently as meat is fully digested and absorbed, so very little waste to eliminate. Don’t confuse not going with constipation. I found I went only every 3 or 4 days and then it was like coffee grounds, no problems at all. But some people do find an adjustment period is needed.

Besides bone broth try to add fermented cabbage, I also noticed that eating soft bones from the broth made in a pressure cooker stimulates bowel movement. If all fails take psyllium before going to sleep with a glass of water
.

Remember that meat is just plants that has already been eaten, sometimes more than once, before you get your chance… and it contains no residual fiber after digestion so indeed if you don’t have a reasonable amount of plant food with it, it can cause severe constipation.

Dr. André Kruger – With all due respect, you clearly have not tried a carnivore diet. I know hundreds of people who eat only meat and are not constipated. In fact, many who have had lifelong bowel issues, including constipation, while eating a plant-based diet, experience a complete resolution of their issues by adopting a carnivore diet.

PALEOLITHIC KETOGENIC DIET (PKD): A diet covering and limited to our physiological needs We have developed the PKD in 2010-2011. PREVIOUSLY WE HAVE BEEN USING THE PALEOLITHIC DIET WHICH PROVED TO BE INEFFECTIVE IN THE VAST MAJORITY OF CHRONIC CONDITIONS. WE BELIEVE THAT THE PKD (PALEOLITHIC KETOGENIC DIET) IS THE ONLY EVOLUTIONARY ADAPTED DIET FOR HUMANS. Rehabilitation of chronic diseases is most effective when the diet is limited to our real physiological needs.

EATING FRUITS AND VEGETABLES DOES NOT FORM PART OF OUR PHYSIOLOGICAL NEED BUT ARE ASSOCIATED WITH RISKS. PLANT FOODS CAN ONLY BE REGARDED AS “RELATIVELY” SAFE AND ONLY WHEN CERTAIN PLANT FOOD ITEMS ARE CONSUMED AND ONLY IN LIMITED AMOUNTS. The diet was derived from clinical evidence and was not primarily influenced by archeological or ethnographic evidence, given that the application of the diet is clinical too. Altogether clinical experience was derived from about 4000 patients. Characterizaton of the PKD • 70-100% animal based food, 0-30% plant based foods (in volume) “Diet exactly confined to our needs” “Physiologically still tolerable diet”

Famous year-long study of all-meat diet (1928-1929) of two Arctic Explorers (V. Stefansson & K. Anderson) – their urine was tested regularly to prove they remained in ketosis:

RESULTS:

CLINICAL CALORIMETRY.
PROLONGED MEAT DIETS WITH A STUDY OF KIDNEY FUNCTION AND KETOSIS
BY WALTER S. MCCLELLAN AND EUGENE F. Du BOIS.
(From the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology in Affiliation with the Second Medical (Cornell) Division of Bellevue Hospital, New York)

(Received for publication, February 13, 1930.)

INTRODUCTION:

“Two normal men volunteered to live solely on meat for one year, which gave us an unusual opportunity of studying the effects of this diet. The term “meat,” as used by us, included both the lean and the fat portions of animals. The subjects derived most of their calories from fat…It is well known that the Eskimos have lived on an almost exclusive meat diet for generations.

“Certain explorers in the North also have subsisted for long periods on meat.

“Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson in particular has demonstrated that it is feasible for travelers in the arctic region to “live off the country,” which means living on meat alone. The experiences of Stefansson and his companions have been given in his book “The Friendly Arctic”

He spent over 11 years in arctic exploration, during 9 years of which he lived almost exclusively on meat. Stimulated by this experience, Stefansson and Andersen, the latter a member of one of the expeditions, voluntarily agreed to eat nothing but meat for 1 year while they continued their usual activities in the temperate climate of New York….” [etc. Entire study is contained in the pdf above]

PAULA’s ADDITION COMMENT: Stefansson lost a few pounds, got even better blood pressure, lost gingivitis. NO ILL EFFECTS WHATSOEVER, ONLY GOOD. From Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories, p. 456, reminds reader of pp. 320-26 where it was discussed that animal products contain all the amino acids, minerals, and vitamins essential for health. Issue of needing exogenous Vit C? Only a problem in presence of high carb.

Thank you for this interview. I’m so glad her story is getting attention. I pray that the information will help others to avoid years of unnecessary suffering like she and I have been through. Fatty beef is the onkl food I feel good eating. I drink only water. I eat no salt. I am into my fourth year as a carnivore. I do have histamine intolerance which complicates things a bit since all beef is aged (histamines are present in all aged and fermented foods), and I have to be careful to eat very fresh beef. I was a vegan and vegetarian for the better part of 25 years and it wrecked my health. Who knew plant foods could be so incredibly destructive to the human body?! Many people with extreme total food intolerance like myself whom I have meat through my Facebook group Principia Carnivora seem to have a history of veganism or vegetarianism. It’s really kind of scary, to be honest. We have been playing Russian Rouelette with our diets and we are not winning. No human society has ever eschewed all animal foods in favor of plant foods by choice until now. Thank you for helping to share the truth.